Prokofy Neva’s Techdirt Comments

Re: Re: Response to: Rikuo on Jan 18th, 2013 @ 9:51am

I'm happy to. I don't believe in the notion of "troll" which is merely a technocommunist means of silencing dissent, engineered by very controlling people who want to take away our Internet freedoms. This entire "disappearance" of comments that the readers here don't like is like Stalin erasing people out of photographs. It's despicable.

Lawrence Lessig began mentoring Swartz when he was a mere 14 years old -- a teenage genius. He spent a lot of quality time with him and was frequently in touch with him; he had just saw him at a Christmas party before he died.

But Lessig, as much as he animated Swartz and indeed lured Swartz into the whole copyleftist doctrine, did not go to the mat for his protege. He was happy to push the doctrine of copyleftism and nod and wink about hacking and rail against the targets of the hack, like JSTOR, but he then said Aaron "crossed a line" and wouldn't defend him. He sits in his cushy job and piously talks about conflicts of interest at Harvard -- nonsense. If he cared about the issues he claims to (and I don't share his convictions), he should have been willing to put up websites and write letters and stump for Aaron BEFORE he committed suicide, not AFTER.

I write this here, and there is plenty of other material on the Internet to draw from.

That a 14-year-old boy genius willingly embraces the hacker set doesn't mean anything; these grown-ups are responsible for instilling in him also a notion of the rule of law. But oh, they don't have one, like Mike Masnick, so they are happy to send him off on a suicide bombing mission the way rich Saudi princes pay for Palestinian suicide bombers. And yes, I will use *exactly* those terms and not budge from my heartfelt conviction because some anonymous script kiddie like yourself with a fake name tells me I'm a "troll". BTW, my Internet name is solidly linked with my RL name on my blog.

Masnick repeatedly tries to pretend this was a "grass roots" campaign when it was conceived, executed, funded and fueled by the usual cadres. That they use mob psychology and get millions of kids on Tumblr scarified into thinking their blogs are going to be deleted by the police doesn't make it "grass roots" any more than anything of this nature in the 1930s was really "grass roots".

Masnick saying Swartz was "no fan" of Google is like people who say Larry Lessig isn't really on the left because he once clerked for a Republican judge. It's a dodge and a subterfuge that evades the very real role Google played in using their huge bully pulpit on their own website to get 7 million clicks. Not to mention their more subtle lobbying.

Lessig is to Blame -- and So Are You

You and the rest of the tech press are despicable for not reporting the factual news of the six months' plea bargaining BEFORE Swartz's suicide (and perhaps because his lawyer manipulated the revelation of this truth to defend his client) and certainly AFTER his suicide when the lawyer ADMITTED this plea bargain -- which is certainly reasonable and lawful given the magnitude of the crime, and its purpose as a dramatic "propaganda of the deed" to try to smash the pay-wall and walled-garden systems of how universities wish to manage academic journals. When hackers deprive us of choice in this coercive way, it is right and just to prosecute them.

It doesn't matter if charges are added as fit the crime because the discussion all along, as Ortiz and *even the lawyer* admit, was about either a plea for a very lenient sentence or some far lesser sentence if it were put to a jury trial. You're forgetting about the media circus YOU would have created around an actual jury trial -- and even Swartz and his family might have wished to avoid THAT.

You must admit: There has never been a hacker ever in the US or UK who has ever remotely served anything like these sentences -- in fact some of them get out of jail free with the Asperberger's card or other extenuating circumstances -- or they turn state's evidence like Sabu. So it is utterly irresponsible for you to keep scarifying with these literalisms AND you have to ask yourselves whether you are in fact aiding and abetting a climate of intimidation that could have acted on Swartz's psyche -- when in fact he would have known about the plea offer and the likelihood -- as Ortiz indicated -- that he could face even just probation! Shame on you!

You binary geek thinkers also refuse to consider how precedent law plays a role in our system; and how a judge is separate from a prosecutor and will reach his own conclusions about how to *apply* the law in a given case. There is absolutely no indication anywhere that Swartz would have served anything like 7 years, let alone 35 or 50, and you're just making this up in service of your despicable copyleftist cause.

If we're to blame people beyond Swartz for this tragedy, I blame Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, and all his other mentors who knowingly incited him to this act yet pulled back and didn't defend him at the end.

When you like it or not, the plea bargaining system is in fact what enables enormous numbers of people to go free doing just community service or getting sentences to time served in pre-trial. You're writing about the system in an ignorant, tendentious fashion merely to serve your cause.

You're a terrible advertisement for the kind of justice we would live under if you were in charge. Oops, we've already seen that with your outrageous anti-SOPA crusade that succeeded in overthrowing Congress so that legislation didn't even come to a vote. And BTW, precisely because there isn't a good law to establish the line of criminality you refuse to reckon with regarding piracy and copying that prosecutors are going to feel entitled to "make examples" -- even with six months -- of people like Swartz. So you are to blame as well.

Finally Turning the Corner on Technocommunism

I used to have to struggle to answer this sort of technocommunism from Mike Masnick alone in these comments, or on my little blog, all by myself.

But now, there are plenty of others to point out how backward his collectivism is, and the high-traffic Pando Daily explains why it's completely retrograde to be whining about paid content in the age of tablets:

Yes, we are finally turning the corner on that silly Web 2.0 technocommunism stuff, I couldn't be happy! I pay for a NYT subscription to read on the web or on my phone, works great, they have bills to pay for their real journalism, and they certainly shouldn't get caught up in silly collectivist fads like "crowdsourcing" stories and expecting the mob to pay for their investigations that aren't going to always please the flashmobbers.

Really? They Still Rip DVDs?

All the usual fake argumentations of the copyleftists.

What's the modern hipster jogger doing manually ripping DVDs anyway? He, what, bought a DVD and didn't get a service online? He didn't stream from Spotify or GetGlue or something? This isn't even the modern delivery system for content.

And as such, the notion that "I should get to do it because these are my gadgets" is only edge-casing and whining, because in reality, you know full well you won't keep just to your own gadgets, and you are merely looking for yet another way to undermine copyright.If you really believed in "freedom only among my own gadgets" you would subscribe to the idea of licensing or hash-registration of hardware for all the devices, but of course we can't imagine you'd do that, ever.

The Singularity

No. It wouldn't be nice. Because people like you who are really technocommunists in your beliefs (liberating property, enabling secretive geek governments like the Obama For America Big Data gang) would pretend that you are "independent," and would not be subjected to even the minimal accountability that a party affiliation and endorsement would compel you to have.

Sergei Brin just wants the Soviet Academy of Sciences to run everything on the basis of "science". And his geek friends are happy to code up a Google-based platform where everyone would just 'like' (yes votes only!) the "principles" that people like you would put up for ballot.

Re: Re: Yes, it was Google-- and the people Google pays....

Google and EFF are both in GNI. They work hand in glove on campaigns like this. If EFF has sued some element of Google on some minor point, so what? The point is all of these people are in a cabal most certainly and they all use their wealth to influence public opinion. That's their right, but let's not pretend this is a grassroots thing, it's not, it's the platform owners using the enormous power of their platforms to propagandize users and get them to virally spread their marching orders.

All of this is alarming because it undermines representative democracy. Nobody elected Google or its minions to represent them except a few million of their geeky followers.

You don't represent the rest of the country, and when you do things like fight SOPA, you will see the backlash in the form of a Republican president.

Re: Re: Yes, it was Google-- and the people Google pays....

Of course they're astro-turfs! They are funded by wealthy former software coders and sellers like Mitch Kapor who made their fortunes from proprietary code and then got religion about open source after they could afford to do so. That's all it is. If these organizations and their paid networks didn't exist and normal debates could be held on the merits without the enormously amplified mindshare they have through the laptog tech press, it might be a fair fight. It's not.

Selective Geek Religious Doctrines

There wasn't "ignorance about how the Internet works". There was just outrageous obfuscation and propagandizing.

Geeks can block malware sites without screeching that "the Internets are broken oh noess1111" -- so they can just as handily block piracy if they get over their ideological allergies.

Geeks tell us content can't be encrypted because of inevitable hacks and spoofs -- and yet they screamed that "the Intenrets will be broken oh noesss1111" over the fact that DNS would be blocked and they wanted to put in some new DNS encryption scheme. Fail. Lame. Lies.

Google spent much more this year, and it was due to "net neutrality" and SOPA/PIPA. And Google doesn't literally have to spend a time when there is an organized and concerted force of Silicon Valley "thought leaders" like Joi Ito or Mitch Kapor in the tank with Google who promote this line.

It's also especially ridiculous to pretend "the Internet rises up". You know full well that's not at all how it works. A few laptop tech media sites and blogs like yourselves whip up the frenzy, all in tune with the copyleftist agenda and California Business Model of Google (free service, let people upload content without questions, make IP owners chase later with DMCA takedowns).

By peddling alarmist blog posts and scary YouTubes that made it seem like every teenager's Tumblr blog was going to be shut down or all of Facebook or all of Youtube (!!!) over some one piece of infringing content (fake and false, nothing like that was in the bill) -- you were able to whiplash the masses. So what? People are gullible.

And hey, Mr. Internet Freedom Fighter, we missed you on the day after SOPA was defeated without even a fair vote, when your big friends Twitter and Google immediately set about doing REAL censorship (unlike the fake censorship they hysterically claimed was coming with SOPA), when they agreed to help authoritarian governments censor their citizens' tweets or blogs. Disgusting hypocrisy and you are a key facilitator of it.

Re:

You are mixing up two kinds of cases here -- the cases of people taking screenshots, i.e. of textures or skins, as part of a process of copying them illegally, versus people who take screenshots of scenes, like street scenes, and whether that is permitted or not. It is permitted by default on the Mainland. On private islands, the owner can set permissions as he sees fit. EFF got the interpretation of the TOS on machinima absolutely wrong from the get-go and continues to tendentiously misrepresent it.

You don't cite any court documents or links to prove your point that there are "pursued cases". So I'm not buying it.

Re: Great News

That's what Mike and his fellow propagandists are hoping to do by hyping this case so mercilessly. It's obvious.

But the case actually shows why we need SOPA to restore the rule of law in this area and prevent the adjudication of cases one by one on a variety of principles like this so that technicalities stall them.